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One of the best things of being in a bookclub is to discover new authors you never heard about before, and reading books you would have never chosen on your own. Of course, it could be a disaster, but in this particular case it has been an amazing discovery. Continue reading →

It has been a long time without writing a post, but September is here, and with it my new intention to write again some reviews of the books I have read.

This month in the bookclub we have read “How to get filthy rich in rising Asia” by Mohsin Hamid. Although I have heard a review about “The reluctant fundamentalist” I have never read anything about this author. It has been a nice surprise, since I have really liked the book.

The book is written as a self-help book, thus written in the second person. You are a poor boy from an unknown country in Asia, who moves to the city, falls in love and gets filthy rich. It has 12 chapters, each one with a general recommendation, such as “Get yourself an education” or “Work for yourself”, being each of them a step to get rich. After presenting the general recommendation, the chapters develops in the “you” involved in a story related with the title.

I really liked the way that is written, and the fact that using the satire criticises the corruption and the capitalism.

To finish, I just wanted to copy an extract, from the beginning of a chapter, where it describes what a book is and how everyone reads it in a different way. Hope you enjoy as much as I did

“… when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million differen people when it’s approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm”.

We have been in LOndon for a year already, but it seems as we just arrived yesterday. There are still many things to discover. One of the hardest things I found so far is to meet English people. I have stablished relations with the people of the Tower Hamlets and City group of Amnesty International, and lately we joined a book club (as I mentioned in this other post). The last book we read is Ethan Frome, by Edith Warthon.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling grumpy, bored or stressed, I like visiting a library or a bookshop. It feels like a sedative. Last time I had that feeling was before Christmas. I was stressed with moving home and moving the lab, when I went into the Whitechapel Library in London. And I found that they have a bookshop, that meets once in a month, and for the meeting in January they were reading Mr Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt. After estimating the time left until the meeting and taking into consideration the thickness of the book, I decided to give it a try.